Postcards from the Creative Journey

658 Getting by Obvious

I attended several photographic lectures in the last few months. After reflecting on the topics and presentations, I think I am quite alone in my working methods. The popular method is, for lack of a better description is “getting the shot.” Guy Tal has a great term for these types of photographers, “Trophy Hunters.” There is nothing wrong with having your beautiful single image hanging on the wall of your house in the same way a big game hunter has mounted heads adorning the walls of his trophy room.

The problem with trophy hunting is simply stopping with the obvious image. It stops when you get the image you have seen and want to copy for yourself. I prefer to use that as a starting point. The challenge is getting past the obvious photograph and using multiple images to tell a story. Be unsatisfied with the first image and continue pushing onward to the next, better image should be the goal. Getting past obvious is the way to get to the real story behind the picture.

657 - The Flame of Recognition First Published 6/7/ 2015

Photographically, Edward Weston is one of my artistic heroes. Reading “The Flame of Recognition” when I was in college was the key event that made me understand photography could be much, much more than the snapshots I had been making. Weston’s “Flame of Recognition” lit my fire for creative photography (sorry about the word play) and his clean compositions (“the strongest way of seeing”) have been a guide for my photographic compositions ever since. I have fallen short of achieving his brilliance many times, but I continue to ask myself, “What is the strongest way of seeing the scene in front of me?”

What made Weston such a good photographer? The question was answered in the film, “The Photographer” by Willard VanDyke (a film maker and member of the f/64 group). In the film, the narrator ascribes Weston’s success to:

• An intense love for the world around him
• A sharp eye attuned to the values of the mind behind them
• Constant search for significant form, the need to find order in what first appears to be chaos
• The discipline of technique the painstaking skill of the master craftsman

In the handy list provided by the narrator there is not a single reference to anything specifically photographic. The characteristics are strictly mental and can apply to any art form. In fact, I would suggest that these four points are essential to living the creative life.

Here’s a link to the film on YouTube. Spend about twenty minutes and learn about a great photographer.     https://youtu.be/5sF8K1NfHnM

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Today's photograph is my attempt at creating my own version of a late career Edward Weston composition. I really wanted to make this post but had a huge problem because I could not find the original negative. The previous blog post had one of the 500 pixel images so common in the dark ages of the web (Remember, like five years ago?). I couldn't remember even what format film was used to make the image. From the digital file I was able to figure out what decade (!) the image was made and from there the search became a scavenger hunt. I did finally find the original negative and get it in good enough shape for republishing this post. 

656 Trophy Hunter Photographs

The thing I fear at photographic exhibitions is the Trophy Hunter. You know you have met the Trophy Hunter when they go into great detail but about the acquisition story of the photograph. They will tell you about the difficulty of travel, the sacrifice of getting up before dawn, and how long they had to hold an uncomfortable photographic position required to create the image. The follow up to the travails of travel include an exhausting exposition of the all the necessary camera gear and accessories used in the creation of the Trophy Image. If you’re really lucky, you’ll then experience the minutia of digital editing with no less than four different software programs.

How can a photograph top a great story?

Putting a lot of effort into creating the image is enough to impress photographers, but what you really need to do is impress your viewers. If you’re not there to tell the story, how will your audience know it’s a great photograph?

655 - Empty Minded, Not Empty Headed First Published 2/2/ 2014

After reflecting upon my wonderful photographic experience mentioned in last week’s (May 14, 2020) blog, I began trying to remember what made that morning’s photo session so memorable. If it was such a good experience, wouldn’t it make sense to try to put myself in similar situations in the future? If I could identify what was conducive to creativity at that time, it might also work in the future. As hard as I could try, I had trouble remembering much of anything about what I was doing and what was going on during those few hours. Some might tease me about my advanced years and loss of memory. I would reply (in the same spirit) I had elevated myself to another level of consciousness for that same period. Yes, I was “in the zone.”

I was not in one of St. Ansel’s ten zones of tone, but the eleventh (and secret) zone. This is the zone of “unconscious competence.”  You and the camera operate as one entity. You are not aware of the creative process taking place because you are the creative process. The borders between you, the camera and your surrounding are erased and all objects merge into a single artistic event. (I was going to say artistic happening, but my outer adult overruled my inner hippie flower child. Again, you must be very old to appreciate the generational humor.)

My words are a poor representation of the experience.  If you have not been in this wonderful creative state, I can’t really explain it to you. If you have been there, an explanation is not necessary.

654 More Ways To Have Fun With Photography

My “other blog,” “The Daily Photograph” is reminding me photography is fun. I get to look back through my Lightroom Catalog searching for images that never really fit into any full blown project. Because I have been working with projects for such a long time, there are quite a few images that for some reason or another have never made it into a project.

A further benefit is I am finding a lot of small projects (four to six images) that I can now use as a suite of photographs included in my new monthly web update. Rather than sweating it out to make a large project every month, I can now have three or four suites of photographs in a single monthly update. Not having the pressure to come up with a big project each month makes creating photographic art a lot more fun.

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A tree on the Kona Coast of Hawai'i. High grade tourist photographs often show up on The Daily Photograph. Pretty memories are a perfectly wonderful use of photographs. 

Stop on by and see what's new today at the Daily Photograph and my web site. There are links at the top of the page. 

653 - Breaking Eggs and Making Photographs First Published 1/26/2014

You can’t make omelets without breaking eggs and you can’t make photographs without getting out your camera. You also have to be ready to photograph when the opportunity presents itself. On January 20 I took the opportunity to spend some time photographing an old house undergoing renovation. I went inside the construction fence and was photographing on the porch when the job superintendent walked up. I asked him if it was permissible to be photographing inside the construction fence. He said that was no problem. I decided to raise the bet and asked him if I could also photograph inside the house. His reply was, “Sure, I’ll go unlock the door.” The next few hours was one of the happiest times I have spent photographing, since, well, last September’s photo safari.

I had permission (no fear of being tossed out), access to a very desirable location (the ultimate photographic accessory) and very nice light. I was also alone, which is fairly important, because with the house in an advanced state of demolition, my footsteps shook the house when I walked. What started out as a short trip to make a few photographs evolved into a study of a very special place.

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Just thought I would wave at y'all while making a photograph of the front porch at the Jones Cottage. The Jones Cottage is one of my favorite places to photograph on Academy Street in Cary.  This is the day I completed the photography of the "Victorian Lady" folio. Various views of the cottage show up in most of the Academy Street folios on my web site. 

652 The Future Is Software

 

May I digress from my usual artistic/creative subjects and discuss a matter of a technical nature? Please stay around for a bit, it's just an idea about the future. Maybe. 

I guess my current camera is obsolete because it is not the latest model in the product line. I don’t worry about that too much because I used a view camera for thirty some years . Technologically speaking the view camera was obsolete about a century ago. But let's think about today's cameras. I think there are very few opportunities for affordable upgrades to cameras from this point on. Yes, camera manufacturers can make better sensors, better electronics and better lenses, but it cannot be done at a price most people can afford.

So where does improvement come? As the title of post says, the future is software. It takes a major investment to create a physical object. A company needs lots of people, facilities, raw materials and a means of distributing physical products. This takes lots of time and money. To upgrade software, all that is needed is a computer and a lot of imagination. It is much more economical (and profitable, I might add) to make software work better than it is to introduce a new camera. Do you think that camera manufacturers will now  continually upgrade their camera software (and charge us for the privilege) or will they try to introduce new upgraded and much more expensive models that look exactly like what you have in your camera bag?

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The Foree Fossil Beds in Eastern Oregon. Used to be you could walk around the fossil beds, now we get to stay on well defined paths surrounding the fossil beds. 

651 - Lake, Rain and Fog, Cascade Mountains Washington, First Published 10/17/10

“Stop. This is a good place to make a picture.” That has to be one of my favorite expressions during my annual photo safaris. So it was this past August driving through the Cascade Mountains on our way to Idaho. We slammed on the brakes and pulled off to the side of the road. I pulled out my brand new little happy snap camera and made this wonderful photograph. Ten megapixels of RAW capture and a Leica lens in a camera just a little bit larger than a package of cigarettes. Five or six years ago I was carrying a fifteen pound tripod with an additional thirty five pounds of view camera paraphernalia in a heavy backpack. I would not have made this photograph then because it would have been too much trouble to set up the view camera in the rain. This year, I pulled the “noisy cricket” out of my pocket and made a nice photograph. I like it but it doesn’t feel like I did enough work to merit such a nice image.

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Well, almost ten years later, it's even easier to make a photograph because I can pull out my smart phone and make a photograph. In fact, I think my smart phone can capture a bigger file and if I wanted to, I could process the file and post it to the internet in one (or two) smooth moves before we left that location. 

650 There Were No Good Old Days

In gathering images for my Daily Photograph Blog, I get to go back, I mean really far back, into my LightRoom database to seek out old images that just didn’t fit into the projects I was doing at the time. My first digital images were made in about 2004 and that is really old, in digital terms of course, and the rapid growth in digital technology is quite evident in the quality of the files. Fifteen year old digital files are not as good as the files I am creating today. Mechanically, today’s lenses and sensors are orders of magnitude better and then there’s the software. Take my word for it Lightroom CC2020 is much, much better than Photoshop 3.0. Current software is so much better that it makes the “old” digital files look really pretty good.

Now, the thought strikes me that someday, (and it probably won’t be too soon from now) we can look back and call today the “Good Old Days” and wonder how we survived with such primitive digital tools. Digital tools will continue to improve, but…

Silver prints are frozen in time. There is no big difference in silver prints made today and silver prints made thirty or forty years ago. The same could be said for platinum prints. The technology used for these two image creating processes has reached the ultimate level. There is no reason to advance this technology because there is no reward for a better way to make a gelatin silver or platinum print.

A few years ago Brooks Jensen (of LensWork fame) and I attended an exhibit of Ansel Adams Masterwork Prints. The best prints of the best images Ansel made. It was a great exhibit by a master printer of gelatin silver prints. We both left the exhibit feeling the images were a little bit flat and a soft. We knew these were among the best gelatin silver prints ever made and they came up short against our current print experience of digital prints.

Eventually, there will be some time in the not too distant future when our current image capturing and printing technology will no longer be current. Then the prints we make today will look just as dated as the silver prints we made thirty years ago.

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This image shows up in the "Light Through a Window" project and as part of the "Fifty:Revisited" project. The image (as you can see in the upper left corner of the photograph) was captured on a 5x7 view camera, printed as a silver print, a platinum print, digitized, photoprinted and as you see it now as a bunch of pixels. Reminds me of the old restaurant sign, "Served any way you want it."

Don't forget to stop by my website (linked in the blog header) to see the latest Journal Publication and the "Fifty"Revisited" project.